


i need my girl

by cartographies



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Gen, Introspection, Sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 23:02:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20182171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies
Summary: Eliot had a girlfriend named Candace for exactly two months in high school, and it’d been miserable.





	i need my girl

**Author's Note:**

> This is essentially writing exercise that got out of hand, related to an inordinately long, post-s4 Margo-centric fix-it fic I'm working on--but for something I wrote in 45 minutes at a Panera I like it, so I'm posting it. I will hopefully think of a title soon.

Once the—not revelation, not confirmation, something in between—that Eliot and Margo used to screw is out, Eliot starts thinking about it a lot. Because that’s pretty much Eliot’s job these days, and Quentin’s, thinking about things, and talking about it in therapy, and talking about it to each other. 

He can’t remember a lot of details about how it started, but he knows he started it. It was after the Trials, and they’d been getting high on Margo’s bed one afternoon over winter break, he and Margo illegally occupying the Cottage the way they would do for any sort of break that first year—and Margo had laughed at something he said, and he’d wanted to kiss her and so he had. It had surprised him. He’d had a girlfriend named Candace for exactly two months in high school, and it’d been miserable. They hadn’t done more than kiss, and hold hands, and gone to the movies, and none of that had been miserable. It had actually been enjoyable in some basic way. Candace was pretty and smelled good and was funny and nice to him, the Fantine in his high school Les Mis production, and—well, it had been a long, long time, for sixteen year old Eliot, since he’d had any positive physical contact with someone, and he’d been starved for it.

It had been miserable because of the falseness of the proposition. He’d been performing something false. Eliot had never exactly had to come out. He’d never had to think about how he identified, because absolutely everyone from his dad on down had been able to see something in Eliot before he himself knew what it was they saw, but he had known that they didn't like whatever it was. He’d first known this fundamental part of himself through the presence of disgust. Candace was a brief, half-hearted, and at last failed effort to play out the fantasy that through sheer effort he could become someone else. 

It had its ultimate origin in trying to please his dad, probably, and he remembered Candace coming into his house briefly before he drove her off to one of their three dates, and his dad making nice to her in the kitchen, on his best behavior, and Eliot trying to feel the appropriate elation that he’d finally managed to do something his dad could approve of—a waste, because actually Candace just seemed to make him angrier. It was like his dad knew what Eliot was, and that made him angry, and his dad knew that any attempts to pretend he was otherwise were pointless and so they made him angry, but it was even more unacceptable for Eliot not to try, and that also made him angry. Well, Eliot realizes it was all pointless now. He obviously hadn’t at the time.

But it was the eyes on them, the performance that made it so agonizing. It was the contrast of the bone-level goodness of Candace’s soft hand with its candy-colored nails held in his with the knowledge of what everyone was reading into the sight of it, as they walked through the hallways. If the charade was successful, if people bought the idea that—Eliot wanted to date this girl and would take her virginity after homecoming and they’d get married and have three kids and have a house with a yard and Eliot would sell insurance or something and they’d host annual Fourth of July barbecues and then die—that was unbearable. The ongoing sense of failure, of people looking at them with knowing eyes and a snigger because _look at that homo, who is he kidding—_that was worse, and he’d broken up with Candace and couldn’t even look at her without feeling sick, and there went the last friend he’d ever have in Indiana.

So, wanting to kiss Margo was a surprise. Kissing her and liking it and thinking of nothing but Margo, of nothing beyond that room. They fucked—a lot, over that first break, bored with nothing and no one else to do, in a honeymoon haze. Often enough for a while, then less, as they discovered the fun they could have picking up and sharing guys together. Then more again, then nothing at all for a while, rinse and repeat. 

Paradoxically, Margo is maybe the only casual sex Eliot has ever had. It was just different, with her. With guys, even one night stands, he was always on the verge of being consumed by it, caught in the undertow of vast need. There was some aching, unquenchable thing at Eliot’s core that only they could satisfy—their desire for him, their seeing him a certain way, was a referendum on his entire worthiness to exist. His own desire an uncontrollable thing, the overpowering urge to throw his devotion at the feet of whatever doe-eyed boy was the current object of his attention something to constantly kept in check, disguised or diverted or usefully employed. With Margo—well, he had thrown his devotion at her feet pretty much instantly and there was no use pretending otherwise, and there was no fear she would do anything other than return it. 

Eliot’s thoughts divert at this, for an afternoon. Thinking of Quentin, Quentin here, now, with him, forever. He holds hands with Quentin everywhere, revels in the feel of eyes on them. He only gets to fantasize about taking Quentin's virginity and he won't ever have to sell insurance and Quentin probably doesn't want to live anywhere but New York or Fillory but—the marriage, and the three kids, yes, yes—everything once unbearable now hallowed. He gets further sidetracked by this daydream, before he turns to picking out how for a long time the only way he could make sense of the intensity of his feelings for Quentin, the only real template he had for it, was Margo, and yet—it was so different. They’d talked a lot, he and Margo, about Eliot’s seduction plans for Quentin, back in their second year, but of course it had never actually happened. Eliot could fuck Margo, and be her best friend, and there was no contradiction, no unease. But he couldn’t do it with Quentin and somewhere he’d known it. The idea of being more than Quentin’s friend was just as impossible. So. 

He thinks about the way he’d turned Quentin down—_and you, you’re not_—deliberately cruel, and formed from a genuine fear, and also slightly nonsensical when you consider his sexual history. But it was because—he recognized wanting to fuck a woman, even if his desire for that was diluted, and fitful, and basically centered on one person—but he couldn’t recognize Quentin’s other desires, the ones that for him inevitably came along with—what he wanted from Alice, from Arielle. Devotion, thrown at their feet. Devotion, that must be fulfilled along certain lines, devotion that if not realized in a certain way could destroy everything. Well, he did recognize it—but its object was _Quentin_, and wasn’t that terrifying.

Back, Eliot’s mind wanders, to the end of that winter break, campus filling up again. That new dimension to his and Margo’s relationship didn’t so much form a new aspect of their presentation to the world as reveal more sharply what had been there all along. Eliot had created himself. He knows, viscerally, the difference between fakery and performance, although he occasionally forgets. There were the first steps on his own in college, the final touches at Brakebills with Margo for a partner. He no longer had to be content with the conclusions of hostile eyes as the only map to himself, and he liked it, the way people would look with speculation at Eliot and Margo cuddled in a corner and the way Eliot could read the obvious run of their thoughts—_are they? But I thought he...? _He especially liked when he caught a certain kind of guy thinking this—they’d look at Margo, look at Eliot, and Eliot would watch them feel it, the fact that Margo looked like that and was laughing low and dirty at something Eliot had said and they might as well not exist, for her. Eliot liked thinking _yeah, I fuck her, and I’ll fuck you so good you’ll forget she’s in the room, you’ll forget your own name_—and then doing exactly that. 

This was a lot of fun until he and Margo picked up a particularly corn-fed specimen, not their usual type, and while he was blowing Eliot, Eliot had made some unfortunate associations, thought about—Margo in his hometown, in the one bar, walking in and all his tormentors from high school red-necked and balding and drinking terrible beer, and Margo not paying them the time of fucking day, and this shifts without warning to the image of Margo in his parent’s kitchen—and where before something like this had been satisfying the sudden invasion of Indiana turns it irretrievably sour. He manages, like the professional he is, to push this down for the remainder of the night, but the next time he and Margo start fooling around rather than studying for an exam, it surfaces again, and it pulls him out of it with a nearly physical wrench.

So—flashback, not quite mind prison technicolor but still pretty vivid:

He finds Margo on the Cottage patio later that evening, a glass of wine on the table beside her, smoking one of Eliot’s cigarettes, she never buys her own. One leg is tucked up under her, the other swinging. He sits in the chair across from her, pulls her free foot into his lap. Looks down at the dark purple nail polish on her toes rather than at her face. Feels the flex of her sole in his hands.

“Sorry about earlier.” That’s not very satisfactory. He hears her dragging the ashtray closer. 

“I’m ready for you to hit your lifetime quota of pussy at any time, I know there’s a cap,” she jokes, and he looks up at her and smiles. The light from the cottage window catches the wicked flick of her return grin. She blows a perfect smoke ring, the show-off. “But what’s up?”

“I just—do you remember that guy from what, Iowa, last month at that bar in—”

“I think it was Nebraska, but yes.”

“OK, well, wherever he was from, I think I have to propose a moratorium on fucking guys from the Midwest,” Eliot gripes.

“Not a loss, I accept the motion to add this to the ban on Canadians. But how come? He was satisfactory.” She wiggles her toes, encouragingly, she’s ridiculous. He loves her so much.

“He just made me think—of home, I guess. I just hate how—I’m free of that place, forever, and I can’t help but constantly think...I hate how. It’s like I’ve carried them all with me. Everyone who treated me like shit growing up lives in my head and usually they’re quiet but sometimes...and I hate even the ones in my head having anything to do with you.”

Eliot realizes, belatedly, that he sounds particularly insane. He’d taken some weird orange pills that he had been assured were “totally organic” from a Naturalist a couple of hours ago, maybe that’s it.

“Oh baby, you need to go to bed.” Eliot nods, he does. Margo looks at him in that particularly tender way that suggests she’s amenable to letting him crash in her bed tonight. They sit there for another long moment, the night growing deeper around them, crickets in the woods. Summer is almost here, the end of the best year of Eliot’s life. They’ve already talked about it, turning the Cottage into their crash pad for the summer, working on hooking up a portal to London. He never has to go home, ever again, because it’s here. Margo breaks the silence.

“Well, I can admit that half the reason I love you so much is how much my dad would fucking hate your guts, so.”

He doesn’t know how she does it. The thought of dads hating him is maybe Eliot’s most primal fear, but here it is as a gift. He wants Margo’s dad to hate him. He could be proud of being someone Margo's dad would hate. He remembers the story Margo had told him, shivering, at the Trials, her father yanking her by the arm from the boy's car she was in onto the concrete of their driveway and in that moment knowing he didn't love her anymore. 

“Good. I hate him too.”  
  
And Margo stands up and takes Eliot's hand, leads him inside through the bright busy common room, up the stairs and into her arms.

**Author's Note:**

> I am on tumblr [here](https://honeybabydichotomy.tumblr.com/).


End file.
